Hitachi 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 Enterprise now shipping

HGST (now a Western Digital company) has launched the 4TB enterprise-class hard drive dubbed Ultrastar 7K4000, bringing in the newest generation of 512e Advanced Format drives. The Ultrastar 7K4000 family touts to offer space-efficient, high-performance, low-power storage for traditional enterprises as well as for voluminous content hoarders and cloud/Internet markets. It is the successor to 7K3000 series, which is used in cloud and Internet data centers across the world. The Ultrastar 7K4000 series addresses enterprise and datacenter needs by putting forth high reliability and reducing the total cost of ownership. This 4TB 7,200 RPM enterprise-class drive features a 2.0 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF), 6GB/s SATA interface and a 64 MB cache buffer. Its MTBF specification claims to result into 40 percent lower annualized failure rate (AFR) than enterprise drives rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.

For voluminous data

Compared to its predecessor, the 3TB Ultrastar 7K3000, the new 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 provides 33 percent more capacity in the same 3.5-inch footprint at 24 percent lower watts/GB. It allows 2.4 PBs (pentabyte) in the footprint of a standard 19-inch storage rack by stacking ten 4U, 60-bay enclosures. The Ultrastar 7K4000 range helps data centers achieve lower AC power and HVAC requirements. It comes with five Advanced Power Management modes, the new drive achieves a 59 percent reduction in watts from peak usage during low RPM idle mode, and uses less than 1W during standby/sleep modes. The Ultrastar 7K4000 range features 6Gb/s SATA interface and a 64MB cache buffer.

Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST said, “With our new Advanced Format Ultrastar 7K4000 drives, we are providing enormous capacity earlier than otherwise possible for environments optimized for this technology, while delivering yet another offering that takes advantage of the Ultrastar family’s long-standing tradition of delivering high-reliability and low power for high-density cloud and big data applications.”

The 7K4000 drive family has been capacity-optimized for enterprise applications and comes with varying capacities of 2TB, 3TB and 4TB. The 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 is priced at Rs.38,500 (excluding local VAT) and backed by a five-year limited warranty. It will be shipping in limited quantities, while its customer samples are ready for grabs.